Insecure Attachment Behavior and Partner Violence: Incorporating Couple Perceptions of Insecure Attachment and Relational Aggression

Intimate partner violence and insecure attachment are therapeutically relevant concepts when working with couples. The link between attachment and intimate partner violence has been examined in the literature, but an area of aggression that often goes unexamined is relational aggression, or using third parties as a means of being aggressive toward a partner. We asked how participants' attachment behaviors were related to their own and partners' relational and physical aggression. We used structural equation modeling to estimate actor–partner interdependence among these relationships in 644 heterosexual couples. Results indicated significant partner paths from attachment to relational aggression, as well as significant actor paths between relational aggression and physical aggression. Implications were discussed. Data for this study were collected from the RELATE assessment.     

Doing Disability: Disability Formations in the Search for Work*

Disability theorists have spent much time discussing how disability is defined. The theoretical roots for these debates reside in the medical, structural, and minority models of disability. The medical model views disability as equivalent to a functional impairment; the minority model sees a lack of equal rights as a primary impediment to social equality between able and disabled populations; and the structural model looks to environmental factors as the cause of disability. While debates over how to define disability are informative, there is currently an insufficient amount of empirical research looking at how people come to identify themselves as having a disability. Rather than focus on how disability is (or should be) defined, herein we look at how disability identities are constructed as people search for work. We show that people's interactions with employers and employment agencies have important influences on how disability identities are constructed. We borrow from the “doing gender” and “racial formations” paradigms to introduce an interactive approach to looking at how disability identities are constructed. We introduce the concept of disability formation to highlight how disability identities are continually negotiated through interactions with employment agencies and employers. Our findings are based on focus groups with 58 people who self‐identified as having a disability and were working or searching for work.     

DNA COLLECTION IN A RANDOMIZED SOCIAL SCIENCE STUDY OF COLLEGE PEER EFFECTS

We describe the DNA collection processes of an initial pilot and full study, which is designed to investigate joint peer and genetic effects on health behaviors and attitudes in a college campus setting. In the main study, 2664 (79.5%) students completed a Web survey and 2080 (78.7% of the survey completers after adjusting for the ineligible) provided a saliva DNA sample. The response rate for completing both the survey and the DNA portion of the study is 62.5%. Our DNA yields are of high quality. Overall, our experiences and results demonstrate that genetic data can be successfully collected as a part of traditional social science survey research projects. To aid others in doing so, we provide extensive details of our data collection experiences and offer recommendations to future researchers seeking to do or evaluate similar work.     

Out of Step? Voters and Social Issues in U.S. Presidential Elections

Recent political commentary has argued that the Republican Party is “out of step” with voters on social issues, costing Republicans the 2012 presidential election. This dramatic claim is deserving of scrutiny in its own right and also for the way it offers new perspective on long‐standing controversies concerning the role of social issues in U.S. national elections. We present results that seek to advance established scholarship on electoral politics as well as journalistic claims concerning the rising importance of social issues for elections. Using data from the American National Election Study, we find that social issues mattered to voters in presidential elections from 1992 through 2012. The influence of social issues on voter choice rivals those of attitudes toward defense spending and government provision. We find further evidence that liberalizing trends in social issue opinion consistently benefited Democratic candidates in presidential elections. We consider the relevance of these results for scholarship on voter choice and elections, noting further implications for commentary on the 2012 presidential election.     

Ackoff's Fables revisited: stories to inform operational research practice

This paper considers Ackoff's Fables, a set of short stories published by Ackoff in 1978 as guides to creative problem solving. The paper argues that storytelling of this kind contributes usefully to management and MS/OR education, before addressing how such Fables might be interpreted. It is demonstrated, using one of Ackoff's Fables, The Smart Jackass, for illustrative purposes, that interpretation of even apparently straightforward stories such as these is not unambiguous. The Fables can be interpreted in a multitude of different and sometimes contradictory ways, and the truths they might contain are not self-evident. Yet, as the basis for discussion, they still have much to offer as educational tools. The paper concludes with a discussion of literal truth in stories, and presents a classification of story types according to their relationship to literal truth.     

Domestic Credit and Diversification of Manufactured Exports from Developing Countries

This article uses panel data to analyse the effect of domestic credit on the diversification of manufactured exports from developing countries. Given the evidence that export variety of manufactured goods affects productivity positively, the results imply that policy reforms that improve access to domestic credit for firms can raise productivity and hence economic growth in many poor countries. In addition, the results also show that building infrastructure and implementing reforms in governance that improve the quality of government regulations are important for encouraging diversification of manufactured export products in developing countries.     

CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY

This essay is about the fate of Cultural Studies in the new context of the market-based reform of Higher Education and the resurgence of liberal capitalism. As the global corporate demand for educational services increases, universities are becoming more like businesses. The trend toward a corporate style university can be seen in the way that its educational mission is being subordinated to the criteria of the flexible labour market. Neo-Liberal forms of governance introduce economic calculation into what were previously social and bureaucratic domains. The emergence of Cultural Studies in the 1960s was a challenge from the New Left to both the humanities and to the historic national mission of the university. The rise of the corporate university and its Benthamite utilitarianism in the 1980s confronted Cultural Studies with its own hiatus. The essay argues that we need to revisit Cultural Studies’ early rejection of humanism and work out a new kind of'humanism without guarantees, if we are to adequately confront this conjuncture and find the moral and intellectual resources to restore Cultural Studies as a critical and engaged practice.     

Partial Round-Robin Comparisons with Perfect Rankings

In teaching the development of uniformly most powerful unbiased (UMPU) tests, one rarely discusses the performance of alternative biased tests. It is shown, through the comparison of two independent Bernoulli proportions, that a biased test (the Z test) can be more powerful than the UMPU test (Fisher's exact test—randomized) in a large region of the alternative parameter space. A more general example is also given.